by Liam Pieper
I didn’t shy away from the fact that I sold drugs for a living. I told anyone who would listen, taking on clients I should have run shrieking from at first sight: strung-out meth heads who wanted weed to come down and scummy part-time tradies who did burglaries and invited me to ‘go the pros’ with them. I became lazy and sloppy. If a client lived nearby, I would call a driver or walk out to meet them on a street corner, but otherwise I would have them pull up in front of the house and drive me around the block while we negotiated. Sarah wasn’t exactly happy that I spent so much time around drugs, but, for me, the money was good and I was trying my best to keep up with her clique.
While Sarah lived humbly compared to some of her friends, the wealth being effortlessly kicked around in her social circle astounded me. I’d been raised to believe that eating out in a restaurant was a luxury reserved for special occasions: weddings or maybe birthdays. I remember my godparents taking me out to a yum cha restaurant for my seventh birthday and being exposed to such a vast expansion of the world of consumption that I stood at the threshold hyperventilating like Bad Boy Bubby when he first leaves the house. So whenever Sarah’s crowd would ask me to go out for lunch, it freaked me out. They had allowances, bar- and bat-mitzvah windfalls, trust funds. None of them had to work after-school jobs. When they finished school for the day they took the tram down Glenhuntly Road and sat in cafés, lingering over hot chocolates and gossip.
I should stress that all these Jewish-Australian princesses and princelings were lovely. Even though I was an uppity pissant of dubious moral hygiene, they went out of their way to invite me to their holiday houses to go dirt-biking or boating, or to take me as a date to Sarah’s debutante ball, which, being goy, I couldn’t attend as an escort. But I felt clumsy and inadequate, unable to handle money gracefully like people born into it instinctively can. My instinct is to take every dollar I get to a hiding spot under a bridge and to hiss at anyone who comes near – although that compulsion is not quite as strong as my in-built Celtic urge to blow the whole lot on ostentatious drinking binges.
Before drug money came into my life, taking a girl out to dinner would have sent me spiralling into my own face-numbing panic attack, but I came to learn how to splash money around. I had started to covet nice cars, to see the appeal of investing in coal. I became good friends with Ponchik, who looked and acted like a Stalinist propaganda cartoon of a Jewish capitalist. He was a music producer and entrepreneur, and was forever starting businesses, making a fortune and then blowing it all on drugs and strippers. He was charming, ruthless, effortlessly winning – a sociopathic whirlwind of money and greed and fun. We would smoke joints in his car, listening to Tricky while he would rattle off his latest evil scheme.
Together we mortgaged the last few months of our last year at school. When our final exams rolled around, I performed miserably. I had expected that I would, but I was still surprised at just how badly I did. Not as surprised as my parents, who were crushed with disappointment at my mediocre results, and who screamed at me until I fled the house to eat pills with Ponchik. He’d never had the same drama. For his final exams he stashed all the answers in the bathroom of the hall before the test and slipped out halfway through to get high and finish his papers off the cheat-sheets. He did well, that Ponchik.
One night he mentioned, with the casual lilt that suggested he’d carefully crafted the idea to appear spontaneous and would not take no for an answer, that a friend of his had some cocaine. ‘It’s a bargain,’ he said. ‘Three hundred dollars.’ I told him that $300 sounded like a lot of money. He told me that $300 was only a lot of money to people who thought that it sounded like a lot of money. He had a kind of circular logic that was as dangerous as it was infectious. ‘Once you change your mindset and stop worrying about money, then money will stop worrying about you.’ Everything he said sounded like a self-help truism and, as he passed me a joint, this seemed to make perfect sense. We argued for a while, but, with some help from Ponchik, curiosity finally beat down the Catholic grandmother in me, and we drove off to score some coke. A few of us chipped in fifties and we crowded into the back seat of Ponchik’s dad’s Volvo as a dealer jumped in the front, made the exchange and then vanished into the night.
We drove back to Marco’s house, piled out of the car and rushed upstairs. The atmosphere was festive. As Ponchik unwrapped the little parcel of tinfoil, it could have been Christmas, were fewer of us Jewish. He opened the wrap and tapped out the contents onto a CD case with a flourish, and showed us how to roll up a note and snort a line. He repeated it with the other nostril, and then snorted a few more lines for good measure. By the time he got around to passing over the CD, most of the gram was gone, and we were grumbling.
It got passed around to a couple of people before it was dropped into my lap. I jammed the note up a nostril, then bent down to snort the line. I’d seen it done in movies, the snorting of the line, the theatrical gasping and eye watering. This was much simpler: the coke inhaled easily, bled into my nasal cavity and began its tireless tramp towards my brain. It didn’t hurt at all. In fact, it felt great. I felt great.
The first sharp jolt receded as a pleasant, cool numbness enveloped my nose and spread across the rest of my face. It felt a little uncomfortable and I was having trouble swallowing, but luckily my speech didn’t seem to be affected. The best thing about cocaine is the way it short circuits your brain and shuts down reticence, humility and basic human decency, in favour of a spiking heart rate and an urgent need to editorialise.
Usually, whenever my friends were bantering, I was always lagging behind, trying to craft the perfect line, a joke I could lob into the conversation like an urbane smart bomb. Now gags and cutting observations exploded in glorious starbursts that came rushing out of my mouth faster than I could properly articulate them. Thanks, cocaine!
Soon I was sweating and my jaw hurt from flapping, but I hadn’t felt this good in years. I wiped the sweat from my hands onto my jeans, and then kept rubbing my thighs feverishly, suddenly aware of the tactile wonderlands that were the muscles in my legs. My whole body shivered with glorious pleasure, every drag on a cigarette was at once soothing and exciting, and everything I said seemed brilliant, an endless cascade of wit that poured out of me. I reached for another line.
Later, at home, I lay in bed, my heart rattling my ribcage. I was afraid to sleep, convinced that if I closed my eyes, I would drift off and never wake up. I thought sadly of my parents finding me in the morning, cold and grey, stretched out on my futon. A great iceberg of anxiety shuddered through my chest and an inexplicable sorrow settled over me. Although I’d smoked a bit of pot when I was younger and taken the occasional pill, I’d never snorted anything before.
I didn’t know Ardian had done heroin until after his death. That was a foreign world to me, one I’d never had an interest in. In my mind, drugs could be divided into a neat binary: heroin, coke, all the powdered drugs that came in sinister little bags, and then everything else. The two or three lines of coke I’d done that night felt like a transgression: I’d dipped into something grown-up and wrong, and I’d get my comeuppance. I lay paralysed by grief, for my imminent death, for my parents, for my surviving brother, for the years I wouldn’t have.
Eventually, I closed my eyes and when I opened them again it was the morning, and my mum was hurrying me to get ready for school. I hadn’t been dying; I was just coming down. All I needed to do was another bump, and then another half an hour after that, and to just keep doing that every day until I graduated high school, then, for a lark, the next decade. Live and learn.
12
Sarah and I had been going out for more than a year, but there were a hundred reasons why I was reluctant to introduce her mum to my folks, not least matters of class, religion and taste. Sarah had been pushing the idea for ages, though, and after a while I acquiesced. I was still anxious about it and so contrived to make it as casual a meet-and-greet as possible. On school nights Sarah usually came around to my plac
e for a couple of hours. If her mum came to pick her up, that would be a good time to introduce her to my parents. There would be a quick doorstop chat, or, at worst, a cup of coffee in a kitchen that had been carefully cleaned and aired out so as not to be incriminating.
At 10.30 one night, Mrs Lubow parked out the front of our house and knocked on the door. I ushered her into the hallway, where my parents stood freshly scrubbed and clear-eyed, and there was a round of handshaking and awkward smiling. Dad cracked a dad joke and Mrs Lubow nodded politely. For a couple of minutes I thought that maybe the whole thing wouldn’t be as difficult as I’d feared. I was congratulating myself on orchestrating the perfect rendezvous and thinking that perhaps I could leverage my new-found diplomatic nous into a high-powered career in the foreign service, when the police raided.
The cops had been watching the house for some time and decided to make their move that particular night. Earlier in the evening, my buddy Dave had come by to score a bag. I’d known him for ages – we’d been good friends in school and sometimes we’d skip class to smoke weed and eat chips. Now that we’d graduated from high school, he was spending the summer in much the same way, stoking his prodigious appetite by smoking bushels of weed. A few hours before Sarah’s mum was due, he’d made small talk with Sarah while I measured out his purchase, and then he waddled out the front to his parents’ Ford Festiva to head home. The unmarked car that had been watching my house peeled off to follow him before pulling him over a few streets away. The cops then dragged him in for questioning.
Dave was an ideal criminal informant, in that he was a craven piece of shit with the ability to sign his own name. The boy was never destined for great things, being unwieldy, pale and easily scared. He was full of insecurities, as though he were being operated by a dozen fearful little men inside a sweaty, meaty sack. When the police brought him in he heartily affirmed whatever crimes they suggested I had committed or would go on to commit. By the time Dave signed off on the confessional statement, which stopped just short of accusing me of witchcraft, the police were under the impression that I was far more dangerous and competent a criminal than the reality. They returned to my house in greater numbers, and better armed than they needed to be, strictly speaking.
Toting a warrant and a disproportionate sense of my importance, officers in unmarked cars had been watching the house, waiting. They were hoping to catch me in the act of selling drugs, before swooping in and busting me. When Mrs Lubow pulled up out the front of the house in her nicely appointed coupé, the surveillance team decided that she must be my dealer.
A heavy-set man in a polo shirt advanced up the driveway. I saw him coming and left my parents and Mrs Lubow making chitchat to meet him. Despite my best efforts, I’d occasionally get walk-ins – those out of phone credit or just too obtuse to take instruction – looking to score.
‘Can I help you?’ I asked.
‘Are you Liam Pieper?’
‘Yes, I am, but . . . this isn’t a good time.’
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘It isn’t.’
Just before he grabbed me, I caught a flash of the Lacoste logo on his shirt and my heart sank. I’m not sure when or why the undercover officers of the world decided that the mid-tier designer polo was the cloak of urban invisibility, but every time a cop has sprung out of the shadows at me, it’s always been there, faithful as a hound, that fucking crocodile.
Poor Mrs Lubow. She was just being polite, going through the motions of making nice with my parents, passing the time until Sarah dumped me and married a doctor. She wasn’t expecting this. One minute it was all, ‘Isn’t it unseasonably cold?’ and the next it was, ‘Where’s the dope, bitch?’ The police, after charging her down, realised that this forty-something divorcee wasn’t the drug lord they’d been angling for. Disappointed, they let her go. I don’t know who was more surprised: Mrs Lubow, who found herself suddenly being given a pat down by armed cops, or the officers themselves, who dumped out her purse expecting bags of pills only to find travel packs of sugar-free sweetener. Mrs Lubow gathered up Sarah and stormed out as I stood staring forlornly after them. This was going to be hard to explain.
Being raided is always awful – for obvious reasons if you’re a criminal and your house is packed full of contraband, but it’s just as bad if the cops have it wrong. As long as they have a warrant, they’re going to wreck the place. Years ago, some friends of the family were running a candle workshop out of their suburban kitchen. Somehow the cops had been tipped off that their art collective was a front for a meth lab, and an armed biohazard team stormed the place to find incriminating-looking saucepans of boiling paraffin wax everywhere. The older cops realised what was happening pretty quickly, but the younger ones stubbornly arrested everyone and carted off a ton of wax for analysis. In the process they trashed the place, tearing apart books and pulling the stuffing out of sofas and soft toys. That one never even made it to court, but you can’t blame the kids for being methodical.
My cops were also methodical. A bored-looking police photographer opened each drawer of my desk and snapped it, before Lacoste guy yanked them all out and spilled the contents over my futon. If Lacoste found something of interest, he bagged it, tagged it and had it photographed. Otherwise, it went into the growing pile of discarded junk on the futon.
The first drawer was fine: textbooks and homework left over from school, a few notebooks filled with terrible poetry. The second was dicier: more notebooks, but one with a ledger of my customers and details of the money they owed me. I had the name written in Korean script, but the numbers were laid out in neat Arabic numerals. Lacoste, already bored with the notebooks – thank God for the human instinct to flinch from embarrassing poetry – flicked through the ledger.
‘What the fuck is this?’
‘It’s my homework.’
‘Why’s it in Chinese?’
‘It’s Korean.’
‘You speak Korean?’
‘Not well.’
‘Why are the numbers in English?’
‘Those are translations.’
Lacoste shrugged, and tossed it onto the rubbish pile.
The third drawer down was trouble. It was where I stored everything I didn’t want my mum to find, fastened with a flimsy IKEA lock. Inside I had a fistful of cash in twenties and fifties, along with a few grams of weed stored in individual foil packages. On their own, either of these things would have been damning, but it was stupid of me to store them together. The cops told me as much as they tagged them as evidence.
They bagged up each item in separate envelopes before picking through the rest of the drawer. Then Lacoste found Bondage Fairies.
Bondage Fairies was a manga comic, a kind of high-kink hentai Captain Planet, in which two fairies living in a fantastical forest battle the forces of evil while teaching readers about the environment and sexuality. My friend Herchal, who knew I liked manga, had brought it back from Japan for my eighteenth birthday as a joke, and I’d completely forgotten about it. In this particular issue, the protagonist, Pfil, saves the day by magically growing a giant dick and using it to fuck a goblin to death when he threatens the biodiversity of an old-growth forest.
Lacoste was a grizzled cop. Pushing forty, muscular, professionally expressionless. When he spoke it was in clipped, efficient sentences, evenly modulated, giving nothing away beyond that he was bored. As he flicked through Bondage Fairies, though, his eyes widened and he let out a long, disapproving, ‘Jesus.’ The other cops crowded around to read over his shoulder.
‘I think,’ said one, ‘that we’ve got a sex pervert on our hands.’
‘I’m not, honestly,’ I protested weakly. ‘It was a gift from my friend Herchal.’
‘Well, don’t worry. There’ll be plenty of gifts from friends like “Herchal” where you’re going.’
Then they found my ponytail. Until very recently I’d worn my hair in a long, wavy cascade down my back. In my mind I looked like a Red Hot Chili Pepper, whose records I li
stened to relentlessly, but looking back at photos of the era, I can see the effect was more juvenile sex offender than Anthony Kiedis. A year or so back, Lilly had talked me into cutting it off. We threw a party, got drunk and she bundled my hair together with one of her hair ties and cut off everything above the knot with a pair of kitchen shears. Then a few of us joked around with the severed ponytail for a while before I absentmindedly chucked it into the bottom drawer of my desk and promptly forgot about it, until now as Lacoste retrieved it gingerly. He didn’t even speak, just looked at me with a mixture of curiosity and disgust.
‘Whose hair is this?’
‘It’s my hair.’
‘Why do you have it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I answered honestly.
‘Is it a sex thing?’
‘No.’ This threw me. That interpretation hadn’t occurred to me. ‘Is there a ponytail sex thing?’
He tossed the ponytail into the junk pile, and gave me a look that said, You tell me, Bondage Fairy.
Once they had piled all my possessions together on my futon, they reached down and flipped over the mattress. Through the slats of the bed, nestled among the dust bunnies, could be seen the package of Glucodin energy powder I used to cut my cocaine. It was roughly the same weight and consistency as coke, and, importantly, it was tasteless: an ideal neutral substance to use as cutter. When the cops saw it, they got very excited.